The Book of Doors

Izzy Cattaneo is Cassie’s closest friend and her primary form of support throughout her life. Unlike Cassie, she has a taste for luxury and comfort; this led her to leave her job at Kellner Books and move into the fine jewelry industry. Despite this, however, Izzy craves stability and safety. When prompted by Drummond, Izzy says, “I’d like to be happy. […] I know it’s childish. If you’d asked me five years ago, I would have said I wanted to be a movie star. But now I think I just want to be happy. With someone I love and children, living somewhere nice” (124). This suggests that Izzy’s appreciation for luxury is really a manifestation of her need for financial stability and security. When she and Cassie first encounter the Book of Doors, Izzy’s immediate reaction is an unsettling disorientation. Even as she warms up to the idea of traveling around the world in an instant, she retains her cautious perspective. She researches the book on Google, attempting to learn more about its origins, and voices several concerns about the more nefarious potential uses of such an artifact. As a foil character to Cassie, Izzy presents a more pragmatic, level-headed attitude.

Once Cassie and Izzy are separated, Izzy is left to her own defenses. Initially, these are drastically impacted by her memory loss, leaving her vulnerable to Hugo Barbary’s attack. At this point, she takes a relatively passive role through the plot’s trajectory, being rescued by Lund and held as a willing prisoner by the Bookseller. Her earlier cautious nature re-emerges as she considers the ethical implications of her role in allowing one of the auctioneers access to a volatile and destructive power. However, the novel never forces her to truly reckon with these questions as the book is never sold. Once the auction is disrupted and Izzy inadvertently fakes her own death, she’s once again ferried along in a passive role as she and Lund run away from their enemies. It’s not until the final battle, in which Izzy is the only person left unaffected by the Woman’s attack, that she’s finally able to take the climactic action of destroying the Book of Despair and disarming the Woman. This turns the tides in their favor, allowing them to defeat the Woman for good and move toward the next stage of their journeys.

Drummond Fox is known within book hunter circles as “the Librarian.” He is independently wealthy, having inherited his fortune from the same family from which he inherited the Fox Library and its surrounding estate. His formative crisis happens before the events of the novel, though he and Cassie revisit it together through his memories: He witnesses the massacre of his friends, which pushes him to abandon his home and everything he has ever known. He spends the next decade running away, much like Izzy and Lund do for a brief period of time following the botched auction. By the time Drummond meets Cassie and Izzy, running away has become his default behavior. When confronted with Hugo Barbary and the imminent threat of his death, Drummond’s unexpected instinct is to welcome it as a conclusion to a life of unmoored suffering. However, encountering the two women acts as a turning point that pushes him in a new direction.

Drummond’s journey is one of overcoming his instinct for self-preservation and fighting against violence and injustice. His wealthy background suggests that prior to his catastrophic loss, he had a relatively sheltered and comfortable life. Drummond was unprepared to face such chaotic evil as the Woman, and the only defense he understood was to remove himself from the problem. This was an effective though obviously unsustainable choice, and it was inevitable that a reckoning would occur—either in a change of perspective or in his death. As Drummond grows closer to Cassie and opens his home and his past to her, he finds a new sense of purpose. By the end of the novel, Drummond has been rewarded for his commitment and courage: He gets to return permanently to the home he thought he had lost forever, and he builds a new circle of friends around him to carry on his family’s work.

Hugo Barbary is one of the novel’s two primary antagonists. Although he and the Woman are both sources of conflict within the story, they’re presented as foils of each other. Hugo is strong and imposing, while the Woman is slight and unassuming; additionally, Hugo is forward and talkative when trying to be intimidating, in contrast to the Woman’s intentional silence when threatening or harming others. He’s designed to embody the worst of humanity: He’s racist, strongly misogynistic, and enjoys inflicting pain on others. For him, sadistic acts are not a means to an end; rather, they are a pleasurable activity. When he’s torturing Izzy, he admits that he would enjoy killing her, but doing so would be counterproductive to his end goal. This shows that despite his violent tendencies, he’s able to think clearly and focus on the wider ramifications of his actions.

Although the novel doesn’t examine who Hugo Barbary was before the events of the story (or before he became Hugo Barbary, which he admits to being an adopted name), there are strong implications that his personality is a result of psychological trauma. Toward the end of the novel, he becomes detached from this trauma, leading to a rupture of the self. Later, when he is sent back to the past, he’s able to purge himself of his pain completely. Thus, Hugo Barbary’s journey becomes one of rebirth. Free from his debilitating emotional scars, he’s able to embark on a new life. The narrative implies that the pain and negativity one brings into the world cannot be entirely erased, as his manifested trauma magically leaves his body and enters that of the Woman. Harm inflicted is thus presented as cyclical. Even though Barbary determines to lead a better life after being purged of his suffering, the impact of his behavior—and who may have inflicted harm on him at a younger age in the first place—still remains.